I believe even the aircraft industries here in America are not doing all that great either, due to poor political decisions and other variables. Even N.A.S.A. is not as healthy as it use to be. I believe if you build it use it or at least sell it at bare minimum display it. I think it is a bad business decision to build something if it is not going to be used, sold, or displayed.

For Britain this is where it all went wrong:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_Defence_White_Paper

Quite simply a staggeringly stupid set of decisions that detroyed a whole industry which at the time was still one of the world leaders.

While I'm sure that was a key factor at the time, it came 13 years after the whole M52 debacle, so I think it was "going wrong" well before that paper came out. And we Yanks weren't exactly shining examples of Friends and Allies, either, were we? (hate the country, not the countryman).

I kind of digressed away from the M52, sorry!

The M52 was a slightly different situation, at that time I think there was a certain political expediancey to stay on the good side with the US which had a contribution to that affair.

Also Miles was a small company, who mainly only made small civil aircraft so the M52 project was way out there for them.

When the 57 defence review came out and Duncan Sandys decided that all manned aircraft would be scrapped(!) the aircraft indsustry was still in pretty good shape, with export orders for aircraft such as the English Electric Canberra and the Hawker Hunter going well.

There were plenty of pretty radical aircraft being developed at the time which were cancelled out flat, the only aircraft to survive were the TSR2 and the English Electric Lightning which ws considered too far along in deveolpment to be cancelled.

I will follow up with one or two of these projects next I think 

This one is a beauty >> Northrop XP-79B "Flying Ram"



Length : 4.27m
Wing Span : 11.58m
Hight : 2.13m
Wing Area : 25.83 Square Meter
All-Up Weight : 3,932Kg
Engine : Westinghouse 19-B X 2
Max Speed : 880Km/h
Cruis Speed : 772Km/h
Range : 1,598Km
Service Ceiling : 12,192m
Crew : 1
Armament : 12.7mm Machine Gun X 4

Edited by Snowcrash 28/02/12. Note, you can add pics from external links direct into posts using the "insert image" button (left of hyperlink button)

Nice find Syber, not sure I've seen that one before.

4 x .50 cal machine guns seems a little light for the period though, you would rather have four 20mm cannon!!!

Thanks, I happen to come across it wile searching military ranks lol. I agree about the firepower is on the low side, I did not do a wiki search yet but maybe that is one of the reasons it was cancelled 

Quite a few articles on this one, but this appeared to be a s good as any:

http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/models/aircraft/Northrop-XP79.html

And that answers the question on the armament, when conceived 4 x 50 cals would have been sufficient......especially in a plane designed to ram it's opponents!!!!

Thanks for sharing your findings I have been to busy on designing logo's for my site, to do any research. The logo's are getting better, but still need more work done to a few of them.

I heard before from someone about some craft being made to just ram there opponents. I thought the person who was telling me this was fibbing. I guess he was telling the truth

I could see the conversation now: What do you do for a living? "oh nothing really interesting, just literally crash into enemy aircraft when needed."

Here is another Britsh design, this time the "Insurance Bomber" the Short Sperrin.

Designed in case the V bombers took too long to develop the Sperrin never made it past the prototype stage due to the success of the V force development. It did however have a relatively successful period as a testbed for engines and other equipment.

http://www.aer.ita.br/~bmattos/mundo/exp/sperrin.htm

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Nice design there, looks pretty solid as well.

Basically WW2 tech with some jet engines slapped on, you boys did the same with these fellows:



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Been a bit sinvce the last entry on this so I thought I would drop in the Ryan X-13 Vertijet:

This one comes with Video 





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I never really liked that planes design, However the concept of vertical take off is awesome. I feel all planes should be able to take off vertically, it would save so much land space

I could not watch the video yet, for my main rig caught a virus while I was searching Google images. I'm on my laptop which has windows 8 and it will not play the video I'm doing a virus scan now, to see if my virus protector would pick it up. If not I will go and delete myself.